Dear Daughters

Published July 9, 2014 | By Greg Hodgson-Fopp

So I’ve a confession to make. I’ve been writing, and fairly regularly – just not for this blog.

You see, for my birthday from Mother-in-law Heather, I was given a hand-crafted blank book, bound with leather and with hand-made paper for the pages and stitched together in a very old fashioned way with a brass clasp. When confronted with a book of this kind, which was probably the result of hours and hours of painstaking labour from its creator, I wanted to think of an appropriate content that was equally old world.

This is the diary that my mother-in-law got me for my 41st birthday.

So I decided to rekindle the now quaint-seeming art of diary keeping with an old fashioned ink-based pen, but with a specific purpose.

I wanted to record in this old world pen and ink creation, who I was, for the audience of my children.

I am a pragmatist at heart. I know how the world works, I am aware of the risks people take every time they cross the road, or board a bus, or walk down a dark street. I am aware that life is fragile, and that health should not be taken for granted. I want to record who I am into that book, so that if something were to happen to me before my daughters reach their intellectual adulthood and maturity, that they would have this artefact to know me from.

Morbid? Absolutely.

Pragmatic? Also true.

So I’m writing a “Dear Daughters” diary.

I’m incredibly, brutally honest in it. When I write in it, I’m thinking aloud as if talking to them when they are in their 30’s or their 40’s. I assume they are adults and more than that, my equals, my peers in life-experience, wisdom and maturity. I write the way I write to no-one else in this world. It’s the literary equivalent of the dancing you do when no-one is watching.

So far I’ve told them about their creation, the motivations behind Matt and I pursuing the bumpy course of parenthood. I’ve told them about their namesakes, and explained all the thoughts and meanings that have gone into their chosen names, as well as the life stories of the people whose ancestor names they have. I’ve told them how Matt and I met, how I knew it was love. How he is different to every other man I’ve ever met, and why our relationship works. I’ve tried to decompose my feelings towards him onto the page, so that they see this snapshot of what their parent’s marriage was like.

I told them about the first time I was worried about them. Knowing it’ll be a first of many, this was fairly special to me. It brought with it an awareness that I was going to have to change. Being scared for them every time they took a flight of stairs, or skipped across the road, or coughed or sneezed wasn’t going to be very neurologically healthy for the next 20 years. I can’t imagine how parents go through decades of this, this deep-seated fear that something out of your control might happen to them. How do you people get any sleep at all?

I started to tell them about my childhood, about how I remember my childhood and what was good and bad about it. The stories that I want to hear from my parents, and so rarely get the chance to ask about. The stories I know I regret not asking for more of from my Grandparents. I want them to have this right there, at their fingertips when they need it for solace or they wonder what life was like “back then”. I barely got through the earliest memories before my hand was cramping, so I can tell that’s going to be a series of much longer entries over the years to come.

In my most recent entry to the “Dear Daughters diary”, I talk about my friends here in Zurich. Matt and I have so many friends, that there was no way to tell them about all of you in a single entry, so I decided to try to break it into digestible pieces by telling about particular friends by location, starting with where we live now, and moving backwards through France, Scotland, London, then finally Adelaide.

Talking about my friends to them feels trivial, but I think it’s important. The purpose of this diary is to give them something tangible that gives insight into my mind. A lot of the time, we see ourselves as we’re reflected in our friends eyes. So yeah – that’s you guys.

It’ll be a record of the first years of their life

In the next, change-laden year, I intend to use the Dear Daughter diary to tell them about their first year. To record at the end of each long and tiring day (or more likely, when I’m up at 4 am and writing by candlelight) what they have made me feel that day. What they did that was so special and how they melted the heart of this old cynic. Maybe it’ll be full of wisdom for them when they raise their own children, and maybe it’ll just be full of overwhelming gushiness. I don’t know yet, I’m not that person yet.

But I think it’s a task worth doing.

So, I apologise. I’ve been getting my creative outlet, and making this amazing artefact at the same time. A download of my brain, my thoughts and feelings, and it smells like leather and paper and ink and age. It’s a gift that will take 20 or 30 years to prepare and I don’t even know if I will ever give it, or I’ll just leave it amongst my things to be discovered when I shuffle the mortal coil.

I will try not to let it stop me writing this blog as well, as I know there are so many people we care about who live so far away from us and who want to keep up to date with what’s happening.

The last month

We’re currently at the 33rd week of the pregnancy, and poor Natasha is having to make more and more room for these growing little ones. Each scan has come back healthy, each check-up is full of good news. We’re optimistic that they will stay where they are until full-term (which should be around the 37 week mark). I spoke to the Doctor on the phone the other night, and he said that his role now is to watch and wait. Ensure that growth is steady and that the risk profile is managed carefully. Natasha is now visiting for quick check-ups more than twice a week, and that’ll continue until the full term is reached.

At home here in Zurich, the nursery is now basically prepared. We’re missing one or two pieces of furniture but other than that, we’re good to go. I had a delivery on the weekend of 4 crates of baby arse wipes. They were on special at 50% off, so I just ordered an entire couple of month supply at once. We have the storage, and I sense that baby arse wipes are something you can never really have too many of.

I keep remembering things we’ve forgotten, but I don’t think that’s going to change soon. Nothing of vital importance has been overlooked so far. Oh crap, except Nappies. But Matt said he’d sort out a bulk delivery. Oh, and linen for the cot. Oh, and singlet/vests. But we could arguably get on a plane tomorrow and it wouldn’t that problematic.

Which is a good thing, as these things rarely go according to plan!

Egg Donor, Part 2: Save the Cheerleader, Save the world

Published May 3, 2014 | By Greg Hodgson-Fopp

Probably best to read part 1, first.

In Part 1, I covered my moral descent from good parent to eugenicist, where I found that when faced with meaningful life choices about which egg donors to pick, I quickly became the flag-bearer for a new designer super-race. A position in which I was a little uncomfortable.

Ruling out the obvious, the less obvious, the ones with bad vibes, and the ones with dodgy answers, we were still left with more than a small pile of profiles for which we could find no valid reason to reject.

So ultimately, once we’d skimmed down to the basics (and we’d been e-mailing each other back and forth a bit with the same profiles attached), we made a pretty human decision.

The Gynaecological Hot-or-Not

Each profile had between 3 and 10 photographs attached. And they did vary quite a lot. There’s something so much more human about skimming photos, than there is about reading massive attached medical histories. Even before we had thinned the ranks, I had started using the photos as instant-reject/accept criteria. It was like a gynaecological Hot-or-Not, like some of the dating apps.

Like the photo? Swipe left.

Not a good vibe? Swipe right.

Not a good vibe? Swipe right.

We were literally ‘screening’ these candidates based upon how they smiled, how they looked at the camera. We were also screening them based on their choices of photos.

Published May 3, 2014 | By Greg Hodgson-Fopp

Probably best to read part 1, first.

In Part 1, I covered my moral descent from good parent to eugenicist, where I found that when faced with meaningful life choices about which egg donors to pick, I quickly became the flag-bearer for a new designer super-race. A position in which I was a little uncomfortable.

Ruling out the obvious, the less obvious, the ones with bad vibes, and the ones with dodgy answers, we were still left with more than a small pile of profiles for which we could find no valid reason to reject.

So ultimately, once we’d skimmed down to the basics (and we’d been e-mailing each other back and forth a bit with the same profiles attached), we made a pretty human decision.

The Gynaecological Hot-or-Not

Each profile had between 3 and 10 photographs attached. And they did vary quite a lot. There’s something so much more human about skimming photos, than there is about reading massive attached medical histories. Even before we had thinned the ranks, I had started using the photos as instant-reject/accept criteria. It was like a gynaecological Hot-or-Not, like some of the dating apps.

Like the photo? Swipe left.

Not a good vibe? Swipe right.

We were literally ‘screening’ these candidates based upon how they smiled, how they looked at the camera. We were also screening them based on their choices of photos.

Not our egg donor

A donor who chose to send us her modelling portfolio, complete with semi-topless shots? Straight to the rejected pile. Then again, she was the one who also said her biggest regret in life was not being taller, since she was unable to be a fashion model. Someone whose biggest regret is not being a model isn’t going to be someone I want to spend 20 years raising the miniature version of.

A donor sending us frat-party photos from her facebook profile? Um. No. Shows a tendency to make poor life choices right there. Not the frat-party, that was probably a great life choice, she certainly looks like she’s having a GREAT time. But the choice of sending those particular photos without cropping the beer and cigarette?

A donor who sent a dozen photos, all selfies. Sorry, but the Me-me-me generation and I don’t really get along that well, so I am afraid her profile and her dreams hit the trash as well.

Also in the reject pile were more interpretative elements that are harder to describe or quantify. Matt didn’t like the way one girl smiled, so she was rejected before we’d even read a line of her profile. Ultimately though, we had to make some sort of screening so we could wade through the volume and get to the details.

And ultimately, we chose based on that

There was one candidate in the very first batch of profiles sent to Matt and I, who had registered on both our first skim-reads. I liked the way she smiled. It was a genuine, honest, smile. She included about 5 photos in the application that were all cropped photos taken straight off her facebook page, I assume, as they were all casual social occasions.

In all of them, she just looks genuinely happy. She was also fairly fashionably dressed, beautifully made-up, and adorned with a very tasteful sprinkling of jewellery and a healthy sporty tan.

I’m a firm believer in reading facial expressions carefully. People will often tell you things about what they’re thinking without realising that they are doing so. It’s not as easy in a photograph as it is in real-life, but you can still get a read off of people in some ways. For her photos, what I read was confidence and happiness. She was comfortable in her own skin, and you could tell that straight away.

Only after we’d both agreed she was a prime candidate did I even start to delve into the copious amount of details that we had about her. Which, as it turned out, were all pretty good too. She was healthy, sporty, had a big family. All her brothers were over 2 meters (6’4″) tall. All had green eyes and blonde hair. She was pretty much the Egg Donor for the ‘Great White Baby’ that everyone dreams about.

Four words on her profile ended up settling it for me as well – “Head Cheerleader” and “Homecoming Queen”.

Now I actually have no idea how American schools choose these quaint titles, but I’ve watched enough American TV to know that they denote some sort of popularity contest. Why would that attract me?

Well, I think it says “Charisma”, something almost impossible for photos, medical profiles or psych profiles to really measure. I liked the level of leadership they implied. That she wasn’t just a member of these things, but when participating in things, she gravitated towards leading them.

Then again, perhaps it was the glimpse of cold-hearted evil manipulation that I saw (am I picturing Diana Agron’s character in Glee). Or maybe it’s flashbacks to the TV Series “Heroes” – Save the Cheerleader, Save the World?

Not our Egg Donor

Also not our Egg Donor

I showed her photographs to a couple of the guys at work, and they agreed that she has exactly the assets we were looking for. One or two of them asked if I would contact her and ask if she was interested in making babies with them as well.

“Traditionally”

Unfortunately, it wasn’t meant to be

By the time we contacted her via the agency, she was already committed to being an egg donor for another couple. We were told she was ‘in cycle’ and unavailable and so we went back to the profiles and started our skim read all over again.

We were a bit gutted. It had felt like such a good match for us.

We picked out our second choice and arranged for her to be sent to Doctor Ringler. She couldn’t go to see him straight away, so it was around a month later when the visit actually occurred. accepted our terms, and duly arrived for her medical screening, and sadly was “washed out”.

Doctor Ringler determined that she would not be a good candidate for egg donation, due to having follicles that were not very large. I wasn’t even aware this was an issue, but I suppose it’s one more thing that we can attribute to supply-and-demand. Follicle size probably isn’t relevant in normal IVF, because you’re going to always try to use a particular woman. But when you’re doing Donor Egg IVF, you have these dozens and dozens of applications, so you can afford to be a bit biologically choosy as well.

We were a bit gutted by this, and the clock was truly ticking now. A couple of months in total had passed, and Doctor Ringler wanted to start synchronizing the cycles of the Egg Donor and Natasha (who we had already met by this stage).

So we reluctantly turned back to ask for more Egg Donor profiles from our agent.

The first one Matt sent me was…. the Cheerleader.

He pre-filtered the initial list, and the first one he said “I like this one” about was actually the identical profile to the original cheerleader who we had selected and then were told we were unable to use. She had different photographs the second time around, but I put them up side by side with the original PDF that I still had, and it was most definitely the same woman.

We never asked (since she’s an anonymous donor) whether her first cycle didn’t go ahead, or whether she finished it and was available a second time.

All we did was make a swift, definite offer to ask her to be our Egg Donor. And since she’d already had the medical clearance, we were able to move fairly swiftly into the first cycle.

It was a weird coincidence, to see her profile again. Matt is more fatalistic than me, and he said “It was obviously meant to be”.

I’ll go with that.

I sometimes pull up the pictures we have of her (which I won’t share, because her request was to be an anonymous donor, and we have no intention of someone ever stumbling across them here by reverse image search). If anyone is really curious, they’re welcome to ask me and I’ll be happy to show them off, I just don’t think it’s appropriate to post them here.

I look into her features and I try to imagine them on a little girl, or a little baby.

I’ve been doing this a lot since we discovered we were having twin girls. I am trying to fix her features in my mind, so that when one of our girls develops a certain cleft in the chin, or a certain arch of an eyebrow, or turns out to have her green eyes, then I can see it for what it is, the true genetics of their shared biological donor.

Along with their names, picturing them like this is helping to really make them seem real.

Addendun – Natasha told me today they’re kicking constantly. Fiesty little girls, apparently.

Egg Donor, part 1: Eugenics meets Marketing

Published May 2, 2014 | By Greg Hodgson-Fopp

Choosing an Egg Donor

As I have discussed before, when we initially requested egg donor profiles from the agency, we were working on the assumption that I would be the biological father of our first (singleton) child. So we were initially asked for our criteria, we said all the things people usually say, I guess.

Healthy. Emotionally balanced. Intelligent. Charismatic. Attractive.

But we also added Caucasian, blonde and blue eyed and relatively small-framed. This was to try to make a mix of my genes and the donor’s look a little bit like it might have been a mix of my genes and Matt’s. Of course, mixing two men’s genes to make a baby is still a year or two off. The science is very optimistic, but we aren’t going to wait for that. Perhaps the next generation of gaybys will get that choice. 

We were initially sent a handful of profiles, and we began to sift.

What’s in a Donor Profile?

A donor profile starts with the basics you would expect – age, weight, race, religion (this is America, remember), occupation and marital status. Then it moves to to the slightly more detailed – hair colour, real hair colour, childhood hair colour, and starts to ask things you wouldn’t feel comfortable asking a new friend (or even some old ones) – did you wear braces? Have you ever had plastic surgery? Are you of Jewish descent? What is the exact ethnic make-up of your father? Your mother? How tall are you? How tall is your mother? Your father?

Then the profiles get into the real nitty-gritty. They ask for the full medical history of both sides of the family, including asking about a dozen different health conditions that you really wouldn’t ask in polite company. If any family member is not living, the exact details of their death are asked, and this then also extends to any and all siblings as well.

But then it got really personal. It asked about diet, exercise, sexual partners, menstrual cycle, what type of birth control has been used, have they ever had an abortion, how long do they bleed for, etc. It goes into a lot of raw physiological data and it doesn’t shy away from asking fairly intrusive questions like ‘How many sexual partners have you had?’, even.

Following that, they’re asked to provide the statistics for all their schooling and education. Whether they got A’s or B’s in primary school, what extra curricular activities did they undertake, and whether they went to one school or multiple schools.

It gave us a lot of background data about a lot of blonde Californian women. I wonder if I could re-use the data for peer-group studies, make some generalisations about Californian girls, perhaps.

And into their heads we go…

Then comes the psychological profile. They were given a series of questions about themselves to answer, which were all free-text, so they could express their personality. It starts with things that are actually related to the process  - “Why have you decided to become an egg donor?”, but it also moves quickly on to their characteristics.

To be frank, I’m not sure how I would have answered these questions if I was handed that questionnaire. It’s a bit daunting. Try some of the questions yourself:

“Please describe your personality now, as an adolescent, and as a child:”

“What are your personal goals in life?”

“What brings you the most joy in life?”

“How do you act when you get angry?”

These small samples would give you some idea of the level of depth that these forms went into. We have this profile of data on which to make our decision, and when you’re sent between four and ten of these profiles at a time, it’s a whack to read through, and a really important decision hanging over doing it right. It also asked them to describe their parent’s personalities as well, and any full-blood siblings that they have, too.

Starting from good intentions…

After reading a few of these, I actually put them all down, closed my mail and spent a couple of days delaying making a decision because I actually felt a bit uncomfortable about the process.

We’d started the process making the same statements that I am sure that dozens of different parents before us would have made. We said things like:

“We don’t care as long as they’re healthy”

“We just want a normal, happy child.”

But then there are So. Many. Profiles. to sift through. You have to make a short-list somehow. The breadth of options made us start to filter them based on other criteria that started to feel a lot more like we were straying further and further away from this. I think I realised I was automatically rejecting every candidate who had an academic record that wasn’t meeting my somewhat arbitrary criteria.

And you end up in Eugenics…

When asked to make a simple comparison: Would you use an egg donor whose family has no trace of cancer, or would you use an egg donor whose grandmother had breast cancer. Simple question, simple answer, you choose the first egg donor. Of course. That’s just making the right healthy choices for your babies.

Okay, next question. This egg donor has slightly higher grades than that one. Which? The higher grades of course.

Okay, moving on. This egg donor made a typo in her character profile, versus this one who did not. Which? Well, surely the one with attention-to-detail, right? No?

But when you have 20-40 profiles, you can get pretty arbitrary very quickly. Some of the reasons for rejecting profiles were starting to looking pretty shallow:

She is too Short.

Her grades were only “A” not “A+”.

Her Grandmother died quite young.

Her Brothers all didn’t finish school.

Her father has high blood pressure.

She had to wear braces.

She had a boob job.

Her one regret in life is “Not Being Taller, so I could be a model.”

She did a nonsense degree at University.

She looks drunk in that photo.

She’s doing duckface at the camera in this photo (I personally think that’s the most justified rejection).

These were all reasons I deleted Egg Donor profiles. Yes, by the end of the process, I was THAT shallow. It’s not like I’ve never been drunk, and at least one of my University degrees is blatant nonsense.

I have always thought that Eugenics was a bad thing. Until some very well meaning marketing people trying to sell me eggs starting making me make hard choices about which egg donors I would or would not be interested in contacting to find out about. Suddenly, I found myself right there, making distinctly morally questionable choices when selecting an egg donor of our own.

Boiling it down to basics, out of all those criteria, we still had around 4-5 profiles which we could not find any conceivable reason to reject.

But in the end our reason for selecting the one we chose was a lot more human…

…. more in part 2.

What’s in a name?

Published April 29, 2014 | By Greg Hodgson-Fopp

Don’t expect me to give away any secrets here, before you get excited. I know a lot of people are really keen to hear what names we’ve chosen for our children, but I am adamant that some things must wait until the day they’re born. When we introduce the children with their names, the two things will anchor together in everyone’s heads in a way that giving a name without an associated baby just wouldn’t do. People can hate NAMES, but I don’t think anyone can hate a newborn baby.

Extenuating circumstances have meant that Matt and I have had to decide on names early, because we’ve got paperwork and things to fill out, including plane tickets and court orders, and what-not. So, unlike most parents, we will not be given the luxury of deciding ‘on the day’. Instead, we needed to decide, like… now. That sped up the debate about names somewhat I assure you.

Learning that it was girls, the shock of which should probably be a post of it’s own since it stunned me into silence for about 2 months, we hadn’t yet really had any names that had really stuck. Nothing that had really stood out from the crowd as a contender.

I’m bound to offend a few people by saying this – but Boy’s names felt MUCH easier. We had boy’s names ready to go straight away, long before we even started the process. But as soon as we were told it was going to be girls, I drew a blank.

Looking at my own female role-models, none of the names really stand out for us. In fact, most feminine role-model forenames are sufficiently common that I don’t feel like I would be giving the girls something unique and precious. I would be making them simply the next in a long line with the same name.

And we had our criteria laid out. Well, all right, I’ll be honest. I had criteria and it was carefully laid out. My husband on the other hand had his own criteria, that didn’t really have much to do with mine.

His criteria were pretty simple, whereas mine were more involved. I am sure every parent can empathise with this list:

• Must be easy to spell, and spelt correctly. I don’t want my daughters to have to spell their names out over the phone twenty times a year for the rest of their lives.

• Must be easy to pronounce, and not contain phonetics (so all the Irish names like Aoife, Sioned, Siobhan are already out).

• Must be common enough that everyone has heard it before (so they can pronounce it). That means the name must be in the list of top 200-300 names being given out now.

• Must be uncommon enough that they don’t know anyone else who has that name. That means ruling out all the names in the top 100.

• Should be obviously feminine, as a ‘could be either’ name just creates confusion down the road.

• Must match up well with the family middle names we have already chosen in advance.

• Should be a classic, something which has been in use for at least a few hundred years. With all due respect, I don’t want to name our daughters something that anchor them in this decade. I want them to have a name that worked well 200 years ago, and will hopefully work well in 100 years time.

Very restrictive criteria when you add up all those. Add to that, “Must sound cool and a bit classy”, and “Matt must like the sound of it.”

Equally important to me, there are cultural and racial implications that must be considered. We can’t realistically name a girl child something that will have people automatically make assumptions about them for their entire life. An example of this would be friends-of-friends who both speak Japanese and gave their kids Japanese names. Now when someone reads out their names, they’re looking around the room for the Asian kids and don’t expect the name to belong to the blonde, blue-eyed girl. I know racism is a hot topic, but it’s alive and well, at least where I live, and we will be living in this world, so we have to accept some restrictions on that.

Rules can’t be ignored either – can’t use a name being used by a friend for their kids, and can’t use a name being used by any relative closer than 2nd or 3rd cousin. Because we all know that ends in tears. Oh, and despite some of my friends doing exactly that, it’s really not okay to re-use a pet’s name. Rover was a dumb name for a girl, anyway.

I also wanted the names to act as an anchor to time. I wanted the names to have history, in particular family history. Both Matt and I are ultimately British/Australians, with specific heritage in England (Yorkshire), Scotland and Wales. We wanted some sense of where we came from to be reflected in the names we chose for our children.

Tough call, eh?

Yet, somehow, within the last 48 hours before we had to decide, Matt and I (who rarely agree on anything, let’s be honest), managed to find a pair of names that matched all these criteria, and sound cool, and have the advantage of the fact that neither of us know anyone ever, in all our time on this planet who had those names. Of course, plenty of people exist with these names (they wouldn’t be classics without that). But the important thing is that neither he nor I know anyone who had these names.  You don’t realise how many people you hate until you start to pick a name for a baby!

So we’re now the other side of that decision, and it’s all good. We both really like the names that we’ve chosen, and we’ve committed to them in the form of paperwork, so they can’t actually be changed anyway.

And I’m amazed at how real they now seem in my head, now that they’ve got names. I can actually start to imagine the little people that they’re going to become, and picture the conversations we’re going to have. I’ve even started writing (yes, with a pen and hand-made paper) a diary of sorts for them to read when they have children of their own.

Don’t worry folks, it’s only 94 days between this post and the due date. That’s not long, really